He chuckles. Thank you. Perhaps I'll ask Fëanáro to help.

I bet he'd be thrilled.

He wants to learn the forge. He's far too young for it, but the only thing that's stopping him from ordering a miniature one built is that physics doesn't work that way, you can't scale them down, and I told him he wouldn't learn as much if he asked Aulë for one that didn't obey the right physical principles.

That sentence is so weird to me.

Forges aren't magic, and one that was magic wouldn't teach you as much about how normal ones would work, it might not produce the same effects in the metal if you tampered with heat and timing and so forth.

Yeah, I understood it, but the whole - obeying the right physical principles, thing... it's just weird. In a good way.

He smiles broadly. I know what we should do, we should do an experiment!!! We should, say, investigate how the waxy coating on different kinds of leaves in the forest helps protect them from withering in bright light. We'll collect twenty leaves from twenty types of tree and scrape the wax off half the leaves from each and set them out somewhere in the sunlight and see which are affected most and wither fastest, and then look at the wax we've collected and try to notice what properties it has that might explain how it protects them! Is that the sort of thing that'd make your universe angry?

She laughs. I was actually trying to work up the nerve to try the gravity experiment that made part of the Shift not have a down anymore, when Miriel fell asleep and I was left to my own devices, but the leaf thing sounds good too!

We can do both, gravity while we're waiting for the leaves to wither.

Okay!

And he races off to get leaves from the trees to do science with.

She helps! (And tastes random leaves, because everything's edible, right?)

Everything is edible! Not everything is delicious but it usually tries to be. Soon they have the leaves stretched out on a rock, Great! Now how do we do the gravity experiment?

We find rocks that are all sorts of sizes and weights and a climbable tree and - this might only work with a pretty precise way to time it, actually.

We don't have precise time-measuring devices. Or any time-measuring devices. How are those made?

I think I mentioned the hourglass. Those can be made more precise than they are normally by magic, which I... don't know how to do. Pause. Yet.

If we had a farther drop, would we need less precision?

Maybe. I'm not sure how fine the differences are but they're not so obvious that you can easily notice them without conducting experiments...

Thus why learning them isn't allowed, in your world?

Basically. It's okay to notice things. It's even okay to do observational statistics. Just not to - go looking more than that, twiddling things until they look interesting...

It's like the creator of your universe hates its inhabitants. But then, why give them curiosity? Why create things at all if you don't want people to understand them and find their potential?

Trying to find that out: also not necessarily wise. I've speculated that the universe likes people as - as animate toys, and we wouldn't be animate enough if we weren't curious at all...

But you're not supposed to notice the edges of the board. He whistled. Once we're gods, we're going to fix your world.

Yay!

A while later some of the leaves have started to curl up in the Treelight and they can examine the properties of the wax. This is a very crafting-specific experiment, he says, I'm sorry. I don't know what other kinds of experiments one can do.